Kyle Ford argues creators focus too much on themselves instead of their audience's progress and relationships. Community-driven engagement and peer connections drive retention better than solo content. He uses Mighty Networks pricing to show how membership models built around member progress outperform traditional course structures.
The number one mistake I see creators make time and time again is thinking that it is all about you. It's about your expertise, it's about your content, it's about what you can impart on other people. Here's the truth. It's not about you. It's about your customer, your client, your members and what they want to achieve in their lives. And the more that you can create the experiences for them to be able to make progress in their lives around the things that are most important to them, whether that's their profession, whether that's their family, whether that's how they think about their health. That is going to be what ultimately matters. And I see this so often that it's really not the fault of any individual creator. It's the culture of the creator economy that says that it's all about you. And, and you know what actually makes it really hard to build a sustainable membership or make successful online courses or build the right kind of profitable online coaching business is when you think it's about you, all you're doing is making it harder on yourself. You're creating more work. You're actually probably building content that isn't that valuable. And you start to like, believe that it is about you when it's not. It's about how do you create relationships that matter to your member that can change their lives, that can help them build the greatest friendships possible, or find that one thing that they've been missing? It is so much more likely that they're gonna find that from your other members in a community than it ever is about how they're going to watch that 10th hour of your 11th video. It's not going to be your content that helps people achieve results and transformation that gives them a breakthrough. The probability is much more likely it's going to be the community or the membership that you create, the relationships that people are able to have, because they have chosen to follow you into a paid membership. Especially today, when you can create a paid membership that's powered by advanced technology and yes, AI, that introduces people in ways that just weren't possible and certainly do not exist on mainstream community platforms or certainly ones that have started in the last few years. I want you to flip the way that you think about your customer experience or what your followers are going to pay you. It's not about you. People pay for progress. They pay for results and transformation. It's one of the reasons why on mighty networks, the average price that someone charges for a paid membership is $48 a month. And most of our most successful, successful mighty networks, that number is 97 or even $1975 a month. Now, those might sound like big numbers, and they are because people are getting results. They're building relationships that are unlocking new opportunities for them. They are going to and having experiences and meeting people in ways that simply are not possible on any, any other community platform. Why? Again, I welcome the skepticism for that kind of a claim, but the reality is we have the technology and numbers to back it up. And that is that when you choose a mighty network, your members are going to meet each other in ways that are just not possible anywhere else. They're going to be able to explore who else is here and be able to see similarities between them. They're going to be able to get introductions in ways that just again, aren't possible anywhere else. Now, why did we create these things? Well, we created these things because we know with 98% predictability that the difference between a successful membership challenge, online course or event in real life or online is whether or not your members are building relationships with each other. They're finding people who are sharing their stories, their experiences, their ideas that create those kinds of light bulb moments for other members. This is not gamification. This is not affiliate transactions. This is not a funnel that is just there to sign up as many people as you possibly can. The absolute best businesses, not just even digital businesses, the best businesses in the world are digital and they create engagement that has people coming back because they're making friends, they're finding value, they're looking around and they're saying, wait a second, I am so much closer to achieving the life that I want to live because of this community that I am a member of. And when that happens, guess what? People don't leave. And when people don't leave, that means even if you're charging $1,975 a month, they're going to keep paying it. Not because they've been tricked into doing so because of the genius of your marketing pitch, but because of the reality of the experience that you have created, that that is profound. And that is only possible today with some of the latest cutting edge breakthrough technology. And I say this from experience, having dedicated the last decade to creating communities that actually have extraordinary engagement communities and memberships and courses that are chosen by some of the biggest names in entrepreneurship, digital and otherwise brands, digital and otherwise. They understand that when you can create extraordinary engagement and you can have people coming back, the world is your oyster. You can grow in ways that if you're struggling with an online course today or choosing expensive funnels and trying to figure out how Facebook ads work on Instagram. Just not possible. And more importantly, that's not any fun. What is fun is when you can watch people build relationships with each other, meet up in person all over the world and know that you created that opportunity and by the way, built a pretty phenomenal business doing so. That is the power of community. That is the power of technology that is built for how do you unlock introductions.
